The Pressure Is Working

So Don't apply pressure. I think this is the logic Ali Ansari Is getting at in an odd op-ed in the Guardian. He spends the vast majority of his piece explaining why US pressure on Iran is working, then says we should not keep it up.

The honeymoon is over. Iran's controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has finally come unstuck. His popularity with the Iranian electorate - the subject of much incredulous analysis in 2005 - seems to be falling back at last, and the country's latest exercise in populism seems to be reaping the rewards of unfulfilled promises bestowed with little attention to economic realities.

Those realities have sharpened with the onset of UN sanctions. Ahmadinejad's casual dismissal of the sanctions has apparently earned him an unprecedented rebuke from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei - reflecting growing concerns among the political elite, including many conservatives, who are increasingly anxious at Iran's worsening international situation. As if to emphasise this point, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad's defeated foe in the 2005 presidential election, echoed the condemnation of the president's public complacency, stressing that the threats against Iran were very real. Indeed, as a second US carrier group heads for the Gulf, there is belated questioning of the president's competence. His critics argue that not only does he appear to have courted the anger of the US, but his economic mismanagement and political nepotism have weakened the internal integrity of the Islamic republic - and proved to be a gift to Iran's enemies.

Ahmadinejad was elected on a platform of anti-corruption and financial transparency, and few appreciated how rapidly he was intoxicated with the prerogatives of his office. He very soon forgot the real help he had received in ensuring his election, basking in the belief that God and the people had put him in power. Ahmadinejad soon had a view for all seasons: uranium enrichment. Of course Iran would pursue this, and what's more, sell it on the open market at knockdown rates. As for interest rates, they were far too high for the ordinary borrower, so cut them immediately. And then there was the Holocaust.

The kicker to this: yes it is actually working, but not really:

There can be little doubt that US hawks will interpret recent events as proof that pressure works, and that any more pressure will encourage the hawks further. Yet the reality is that while Ahmadinejad has been his own worst enemy, the US hawks are his best friends. Ahmadinejad's demise, if it comes, will have less to do with the international environment and more with his own political incompetence. There is little doubt that it will take more than a cosmetic change to get Washington to listen to Iran. But the real question mark, as the Baker-Hamilton commission found to its cost, is whether Washington is inclined to listen at all.

This is, I think, is a very odd conclusion to what was a pretty straightforward review of what has gone wrong for Ahmadinejad.

UPDATE: Others are also noticing the incoherence. Dan Riehl, Jules Crittenden, Captain's Quarters, The Belmont Club, BrothersJudd Blog, Hot Air,

Treasonous Talons

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard, your faithful scriveners of all matters related to the Animal Uprising™ regret to be the bearers of bad news of this magnitude. The very symbol of America, the bird who's likeness actually is upon our currency and even upon our great seal of the nation has betrayed us.

The bald eagles have gone over to the dark side.

JUNEAU, Alaska - About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines.

"You have to live in Alaska to have this kind of outage scenario," said Gayle Wood, an Alaska Electric Light & Power spokeswoman. "This is the story of the overly ambitious eagle who evidently found a deer head in the landfill."

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have it on good authority that the treasonous Benedict Eagle was testing a new demon deerhead demolition device but was unable to gain sufficient altitude, thereby blacking out the area. Serves the feathered felon right as far as we're concerned.

Oklahoma

Miss Oklahoma has won the title of Miss America, 2007. And no, I was not watching it, my daughter was and told me about it. But there is a nice hi-res picture at the link.

He’s Right

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has introduced a bill to stop the sale of surplus F-14 parts. The only country that still has F-14's is Iran. We should not be letting those parts out onto the surplus market. Period. I said so when this story came out.

Sen. Ron Wyden's bill came in response to an investigation by The Associated Press that found weaknesses in surplus-sale security that allowed buyers for countries including Iran and China to surreptitiously obtain sensitive U.S. military equipment including Tomcat parts.

The Oregon Democrat's legislation would ban the Defense Department from selling surplus F-14 parts and prohibit buyers who have already acquired surplus Tomcat parts from exporting them. Wyden's bill, the Stop Arming Iran Act, is co-sponsored by the Senate's No. 2 lawmaker, Democratic Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois.

Look, if the "part" is a nut or a bolt, it isn't worth getting het up about. But if it is unique to the F-14, destroy it - period. No discussion needed. There is only one country that can use those parts. And they want to destroy us. There is no reason to try to recover costs from these parts that is worth an American life in the future.

Hubble Out Of Commission

The Hubble telescope has suffered a failure of the main camera. It is unlikely that it can be restored to operation unless a repair mission is carried out. The impact of the loss of the Hubble is enormous to astronomers.

While other scientific work can still be done by the aging observatory, the unit that failed, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, is the one most scientists depend upon. NASA scientists say they expect to be able to restore just one-third of its observation ability, probably by mid-February.

"We're not optimistic at all" about returning it to full function, said Dave Leckrone, a senior scientist on the Hubble at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

However, all is not lost. Next year NASA plans to send space shuttle astronauts to upgrade the popular telescope in a mission to install new instruments that will actually exceed the capabilities of the current system.

In the meantime, astronomers must fall back on the 16-year-old Hubble's other instruments.

"So, clearly the observations will continue, science will continue, but it's a great loss, no doubt. It's a great loss because this was a fantastic camera that just produced incredible science," said astronomer Mario Livio at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which coordinates use of the Hubble by the scientific community. He called the broken camera system a "serious workhorse."

The Hubble's main camera shut down over the weekend, the third outage in less than a year for the instrument. An initial investigation determined its backup power supply had failed, NASA said.

Installed during a March 2002 servicing mission, the Advanced Camera for Surveys increased Hubble's vision and has provided the clearest pictures yet of galaxy formation in the very early universe. The instrument consists of three electronic cameras, filters and dispersers that detect light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared.

Hurry faster on the repairs, please. Hubble has produced some truly amazing pictures.

NASA Photograph, STScI

Guest Blogger

Palestinians Announce Ceasefire

From AFP:

Palestinian ceasefire due in hours: minister

GAZA CITY (AFP) - The Palestinian ruling party Hamas and its rivals Fatah will enforce a ceasefire from 0100 GMT on Tuesday to end four days of bloodshed that has left 33 dead, foreign minister Mahmud Zahar said.

"A ceasefire will come into force at 3:00 am (0100 GMT). All clashes must stop and armed men must withdraw immediately from the streets," Zahar told journalists, reading out a joint statement by the two sides.

He was speaking after the Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya held talks with Rawhi Fattuh, a representative of Palestinian Fatah president Mahmud Abbas. Representatives of Egyptian security forces also attended the meeting.

The statement also called for militants loyal to both parties to release hostages they have taken over recent days. Zahar added that Haniya and Abbas would meet soon to relaunch a dialogue.

The wave of violence was the worst since Hamas rose to power in a landslide election in January 2006, and torpedoed talks to broker a power-sharing agreement between Hamas loyalists and the once dominant Fatah.

That makes it 7 p.m. Central time. The pool is now open: how soon after the ceasefire will the first violation occur? Place your guess in comments. (I got 15 minutes. I'm being optimistic).

Aliens Bombard Florida

The aliens are at it again. They've apparently given up on New Jersey and moved on to Florida. Now they're dropping icebergs on Ford Mustangs.

TAMPA, Fla. - Raymond Rodriguez was changing a tire when an 18-inch chunk of ice plummeted from the sky with a piercing whistle, then a metallic crunch. The ice chunk crushed the roof of a nearby Ford Mustang on Sunday morning. No one was hurt.

"I was scared," Rodriguez said, who was only feet away. "It's crazy, man."

The Federal Aviation Administration is reviewing flight schedules to see if the ice fell off a plane. The ice did not have a blue tint that would indicate it came from a plane's lavatory. The National Weather Service said conditions in Tampa were not favorable for the formation of large balls of ice, known as megacryometeors. (Ed Note: What do they call the ones from a lavatory?)

Maybe the aliens are making a statement about Fords. Maybe they read Don Surber's blog.

UPDATE: All Hail tabitharuth. From the comments section, the correct answer to "Ed Note: What do they call the ones from a lavatory?" is: A Peeteor. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. And I have submitted it to the Urban Dictionary because it NEEDS to be a word. (I credited tabitharuth - brilliance needs to be recognized).

Damn Nice Of Them

The Russian government is thinking about maybe investigating the theft of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) from their nuclear facilities. Mind you, they're only considering it. Hell, only two Russians have been arrested so far selling HEU illegally.

Damn nice of them, isn't it?

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is considering an inquiry into possible theft of highly enriched uranium from its nuclear sites, a spokesman for the Prosecutor-General said on Monday, as another uranium smuggling report surfaced from Georgia.

Georgia announced last week that in February 2006 a Russian citizen was arrested and jailed for trying to sell 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of highly enriched uranium-235 to Islamist extremists. Russia called the announcement a provocative act.

Documents from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) seen by Reuters suggested the uranium may have come from the Russian city of Novosibirsk in Siberia.

"The Russian Prosecutor-General has asked for copies of documents (from Georgia) to start checks, and to consider launching a criminal case on the illegal purchase and holding of radioactive substances," the spokesman said.

Highly enriched uranium in big enough quantities can be used to make a nuclear bomb.

A senior Georgian government official told Reuters on Monday a similar nuclear smuggling case occurred in 2003.

At this rate, they'll get around to looking into it a little bit about two years after the second detonation.

Rodents Of Unusual Size…..

Port Elizabeth in South Africa is under siege by "rats the size of cats" according to the Mail & Guardian newspaper. The situation is considered rather serious. Of course, it isn't being taken seriously by the government, just by the people who have to deal with it.

"It goes all the way from the top end of Rink Street to the harbour. I have had myriad complaints from businesses catering to tourism, such as restaurants."

Dries van Niekerk, chairperson of the Pest Controllers' Association, Eastern Province region, said rat-control programmes in private or corporate-owned buildings had ceased over the past 10 years.

This has resulted in the rat population explosion.

Van Niekerk said filthy conditions in certain dilapidated, vandalised, and vagrant-occupied buildings on the Hill provided ideal breeding conditions for the rats.

Mandela Bay Development Agency chief executive officer Pierre Voges said: "I'm not denying [we have a serious rat problem] for a second. A lot of property owners have complained about it. I wrote to the municipality asking them to do something about the rats, but never got an answer."

Municipal environmental services business-unit manager Dr Paul Martin said the areas concerned are being monitored and bait set at several key spots.

The city has responded by hiring a new spokesman to assure the populace that there are no enormous rats. None at all. Can't happen. Uh uh.

About Time

The New York Sun reports that US intelligence officials are working on declassifying material that implicates Iran in providing lethal explosive devices to the Iraqi insurgents. I have mentioned before that the troops know exactly when shipments come in from Iran. But now the US appears to be ready to share the proof it has.

WASHINGTON — New evidence of Iran's role in Iraq will be made in Baghdad by the chief spokesman for the multinational forces in Iraq, Major General William Caldwell. The Directorate of National Intelligence worked over the weekend to clear new intelligence and information that sources inside the intelligence community said would implicate Iran in deliberately sending particularly lethal improvised explosives to terrorists to kill coalition soldiers.

The intelligence community is currently debating whether to make the new evidence, which it plans to declassify, available on the Internet.

The plan to present the evidence will coincide with a presentation this week by Ambassador Khalilzad to the press detailing the charges against Iranian operatives affiliated with the country's Quds Force arrested in the last six weeks in three raids.

The decision to go public with new evidence on Iran's role in fomenting Iraq's civil war and in working with terrorists killing American soldiers marks a change in strategy for the Bush administration, which has until now provided scant evidence to the public about Iran's role in the Iraq conflict. Since the president unveiled his new war strategy on January 10, leading Democrats have challenged claims of Iran's role and intentions in the Iraq war.

The predictable pooh-poohing is already underway, of course. We'll have to see what they reveal, of course, to know how reliable the intelligence is. But even the naysayers are not trying to say there is no evidence of Iranian involvement. The LA Times called it "scant". There shouldn't be ANY. Iraqi death squad ringleaders are sheltering in Iran ahead of the US surge. Other insurgents are reported to be heading for Syria for protection. That alone is enough to indicate who is involved in fomenting the insurgency.

The predictable pooh-poohing is already underway, of course. We'll have to see what they reveal, of course, to know how reliable the intelligence is. But even the naysayers are not trying to say there is no evidence of Iranian involvement. The LA Times called it "scant". There shouldn't be ANY. Iraqi death squad ringleaders are sheltering in Iran ahead of the US surge. Other insurgents are reported to be heading for Syria for protection. That alone is enough to indicate who is involved in fomenting the insurgency.

Shaddap When I’m Conversin’ Widja

Hillary solves ALL the world's problems. Now excuse while I go gouge my mind's eye out. I did NOT need that mental image.

A Severe Case

This op-ed from the Los Angeles Times astounds me. David Bell is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a contributing editor for the New Republic magazine. And he appears to be trying to reframe 9/11 and the aftermath of that day by arguing it wasn't really all that bad and we're over-reacting. Hell, it was only 3,000 or so Americans. No big deal. Nothing to see, move along.

Good lord.

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies' objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the "Islamo-fascist" enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler's implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in automobile accidents……..

…….Yet as the comparison with the Soviet experience should remind us, the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler — can you imagine a better recruiting tool? To fight them effectively, we need coolness, resolve and stamina. But we also need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.  

Bell says it is all Western civilization's fault. The Enlightenment did it. No, really. Bell is arguing the line that this is really a law enforcement issue, not an existential war for survival. Apparently because there isn't enough of a body count yet. Will a crater where an American city once stood be a high enough body count, professor? Will a significant number of Americans turned into incandescent gas get your attention? Will Iran lobbing a nuclear tipped missile at Europe penetrate to the heights of the Ivory tower you inhabit? Assuming your ivory tower isn't at ground zero, of course. Because I imagine that the fireball might get your attention just before you vaporized.

Bell's take is one of the most incredible cases of rectal-cranial inversion I think I have seen recently.

John at Argghhh! takes a little more studious look at the professor's attempt at revisionist reframing. Not that he's any more complimentary. Curt at Flopping Aces is even more angry about this than I am - or at least unleashes more abuse. Punditarian at the Astute Bloggers disassembles Bell and his politics.

UPDATE: Others: The Jawa Report, Flopping Aces, Dr. Sanity, Dean's World, Right Wing Nut House, Jules Crittenden, Macsmind, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Dan Riehl, The Hound of Ulster, Jules Crittenden, Greg Tinti,

Fauxtography And Hezbollah

Hey, it worked with Rueters, the Associated Press and the New York Times, why not for Hezbollah television? Michael Totten notes two Lebanese bloggers (Rampurple and Jeha) catching Hezbollah puppet Michel Aoun trying to foist a fauxtography exhibit onto the public.

About That Memory Hole

John Fund, at least, is trying to keep asking questions about Sandy "Socks" Berger and his bergerlary of the National Archives. The rest of the media appears to be doing its level best to make this a non-story. Instead of asking what documents this thief stole and destroyed, the media is burying it. Fund wants to know what those documents were. He is insisting that the government administer the lie-detector test that was agreed to as part of Berger's sweetheart plea bargain.

What could have been so important for Mr. Berger to take such risks? Was he trying to airbrush history by removing embarrassing information about the Clinton administration's fight against Osama bin Laden? As columnist Ron Cass has noted with dry understatement, "Bill Clinton has great sensitivity to his place in history and to accusations that he did too little to respond to al Qaeda." Last year the former president blew up when Chris Wallace of "Fox News Sunday" asked him, "Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were president?"

Richard Miniter, author of "Losing bin Laden," notes that in 1996 President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan wrote Mr. Clinton a letter offering to hand over bin Laden, then living in Khartoum. A draft of that document was seen on the desk of a Sudanese official by then-U.S. Ambassador Tim Carney. The document itself has never been found, although there is no suggestion it was among the papers Mr. Berger was perusing.

Despite all of these unanswered questions, Mr. Berger was allowed to plead guilty last year to only a misdemeanor charge. As part of a plea agreement, the Justice Department asked him to pay a $10,000 fine for the violations, perform 100 hours of community service and lose his security clearance for just three years (meaning that he will be eligible to regain it just about the time the next president takes office). The presiding judge, outraged at the lenient plea bargain, bumped the fine up to $50,000.

The Inspector General's report found that the papers Mr. Berger took outlined the adequacy of the government's knowledge of terrorist threats in the U.S. in the final months of the Clinton administration–documents that could have been of some interest to the 9/11 Commission, before which Mr. Berger was scheduled to testify. The Washington Post buried news of the Inspector General's report on page 7; the New York Times dumped it on page 36.

But the report did catch the attention of Rep. Tom Davis, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who last month, while he was still committee chairman, finished his own probe of the Berger affair. This week he and 17 other top Republicans wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to detail the deficiencies the committee has found in the Justice Department's handling of the Berger case. They specifically asked him to administer the polygraph examination that Mr. Berger agreed to but was inexplicably never given.

This, I think, is a huge failure on the part of the Justice Department. Berger should have been investigated six ways from Sunday and raked over the coals in an attempt to get a handle on what he stole. The media is trying to ignore it, but this really matters. What did Berger steal - what was he hiding? Fund can be very, very good at keeping pressure on. I hope he continues.

UPDATE: Others: Daily Pundit, Wizbang, BLACKFIVE, Sister Toldjah,